Zvain's defiance crumbled; all that remained was the terror. His knees buckled. Yohan caught him as he went down. "He said it would work... He gave me magic and said I was a defiler forever." Tears began to flow, and brokenhearted sobs. "He said I'd made my choice. That I couldn't go back."

Zvain clung to Yohan's arm, pleading for mercy. He might as well have pleaded with a tree or a stone. Then he twisted himself around until he could see Pavek.

"Pavek? I thought I had no choice... Pavek? I'm sorry Pavek. I'm sorry..."

Pavek turned away.

"Pavek? Help me, Pavek... Help me, Pavek... please?" please?"

But Zvain's fate wasn't in his hands, and for that he was grateful; ashamed because he didn't know right from wrong where the boy was concerned; and that much more grateful that the decision belonged to Telhami, who had no similar hesitations.

"Quraite is guarded land, boy," Telhami said, not kindly. "Your magic cannot work here. Or anywhere. Escrissar lied to you. He gave you no magic, only delusions."

"The plants died. They turned to ash and died. died. I saw them!" I saw them!"

"You saw lies, whatever you saw." Her voice hardened. "And you believed the lies because they spoke to the darkest corner of your heart." For the third and final time, she ordered, "Take him to my grove."

The circle of farmers opened, letting Yohan and the stumbling, weeping boy through. Then it sealed again. Ignoring Zvain's cries, they listened as Telhami described the defense Quraite would mount against Escrissar's inevitable a.s.sault.

Until Zvain's wails could no longer be heard.

Quraite had two defenses: the power of its guardian, which only Telhami and Akashia could effectively wield, and the formidable natural barrier of the Sun's Fist. Plant magic of the sort Zvain had tried to wield could have no effect in the Fist where nothing grew to energize it. Templar spell-craft would work, Pavek suspected, if Escrissar were foolish enough to invoke King Hamanu's name.

On the other hand, the sorcerer-king might well destroy Quraite once he knew where it was; his power was such that no one, not even Telhami, could stand against him; and without Telhami or another druid to shape and focus it, the guardian's great power would lie dormant no matter how great the danger.

Pavek doubted that Escrissar would invoke templar spell-craft, and told Telhami so.

"But while the king might might destroy Quraite," he concluded, "he destroy Quraite," he concluded, "he will will destroy Escrissar. The interrogator's playing both ends against the middle. If what the Moonracers said is true, and Escrissar has sent Laq to Nibenay with Urik's seal on it, then he's gone much too far. Hamanu coddles his pets, but he'll destroy them if they cross him. There's always someone else waiting to take a favorite's place. Unless Escrissar's ingratiated himself with Nibenay's Shadow-King, the only spellcraft you've got to worry about is your own." destroy Escrissar. The interrogator's playing both ends against the middle. If what the Moonracers said is true, and Escrissar has sent Laq to Nibenay with Urik's seal on it, then he's gone much too far. Hamanu coddles his pets, but he'll destroy them if they cross him. There's always someone else waiting to take a favorite's place. Unless Escrissar's ingratiated himself with Nibenay's Shadow-King, the only spellcraft you've got to worry about is your own."

He waited for Telhami's response. The discussion-reduced to the druid and farmer elders, Yohan and himself-had moved inside her hut. Akashia would've been included if she'd had the strength. As it was, she was resting reluctantly in her hut, with a pair of women posted outside her door to see that she stayed there.

Pavek hadn't been included, either, at least not by invitation; but he hadn't been told to leave-yet.

"And do you judge it likely that the Lion's pet would find favor in Nibenay?" Telhami's hat hung on its peg. She framed her question with a single upward-arching eyebrow. "The kings don't trust the templars they themselves have raised; they certainly wouldn't trust a templar another king raised. The Shadow-King could lie as easily to Escrissar as Escrissar lied to Zvain-and abandon him just as easily."

"You think I was too harsh with him, don't you?" It was not the response he'd been expecting, not a subject he wanted to consider, especially with witnesses. "I don't think at all," he stammered. "I shouldn't be here "

"Nonsense. We need to know what you think, and you need to know what I decide. The boy is nothing-part of Escrissar's villainy. A small but important part through which Escrissar could attack your greatest weakness, and so win Quraite."

"Weakness?"

"Your humanity, but a weakness nonetheless. Done is done, Pavek, but he won't reach us through that that one again. Despite what the boy would have us believe, Escrissar won't come with magic, and he won't come with ten thousand men, but he won't likely come alone, either. For a while, weeds will grow rampant in our fields; you and Yohan will drill our farmers with hoes and flails. We must be ready for an ordinary battle, mustn't we?" one again. Despite what the boy would have us believe, Escrissar won't come with magic, and he won't come with ten thousand men, but he won't likely come alone, either. For a while, weeds will grow rampant in our fields; you and Yohan will drill our farmers with hoes and flails. We must be ready for an ordinary battle, mustn't we?"

"It won't be ordinary, Grandmother," Yohan interjected. "Escrissar's a mind-bender. He doesn't need any help to spew his nightmares."

"But he does need help to clean up after himself and his nightmares. You deal with those minions. I'll deal with Escrissar." Telhami stared past them all. Her lips tightened into a thin smile. "I'll deal with the interrogator-personally."

A kank-back journey from Urik to the guarded lands took four days. Quraite had that long, at a minimum, to prepare for Escrissar's a.s.sault, if they believed Zvain told the truth when he said that his master would come as quickly as he could. And in that matter, at least, no one doubted Zvain's veracity.

Quraite might have even more time. The more men, weapons, and supplies Escrissar brought with him, the longer it would take to organize the expedition. That was an inescapable fact of military life every templar, regardless of his rank or bureau, well knew. And Escrissar could hardly a.s.semble his supplies in public or march out of the city gates in splendid formation without Hamanu asking questions Escrissar wouldn't want to answer. Stealth would be required, and stealth took time.

They could have a fifteen-day week before disaster struck. Or much longer. Or less, if Escrissar proved inordinately efficient.

And if Telhami had sent Zvain tumbling before he'd had enough time to reveal the secrets of the Sun's Fist to Escrissar, as Zvain swore she had, there was a chance the interrogator would blunder onto the salt flats unaware of their breadth and unprepared for their dangers.

If Zvain was telling the truth. In Pavek's opinion, the boy still had ample reason to lie. Zvain was telling the truth. In Pavek's opinion, the boy still had ample reason to lie.

Contrary to Telhami's expectations, the guardian had not swallowed Zvain. The boy had already spent five long days and longer nights in Telhami's grove. Cut off from everything familiar, twice-betrayed by Elabon Escrissar-once when the interrogator deceived him into believing he'd doomed himself to a defiler's life, and the second time, a consequence of the first, when his carefully memorized spell had failed to kindle a destructive blast of sorcery-Zvain had spilled tales of his life in House Escrissar as freely as a poorly woven basket leaked water whenever anyone checked to see if he was still alive.

"Everything watches me," Zvain said to Pavek on the morning of his sixth day in the grove. A day when Pavek's increasingly sharp sense of guilt and responsibility had driven him across the barrens to visit the boy at last. "The bugs and the birds, the trees and the stones. Everything. Even the water." The boy's red-rimmed eyes flickered nervously, seeming unable to rest on any one object within the grove. "It all watches me and listens."

Zvain's gaze settled then on him, steady and accusing. "Just like at Escrissar's. No better. Worse, maybe."

And Pavek couldn't forget being faced with that look, clenched fists in the night.

But then the eyes filled, the pleading note returned to the boy's hoa.r.s.e voice. "How can I make them know I'm sorry, Pavek? Tell Kashi I'm sorry, that I didn't mean it, any of it." And the small fingers sought his own, which clenched back of their own accord. "Please make her believe? There're dead things here, Pavek. I can see them at night and whenever I go to the trees' edge."

The hand trembled with what, he suspected, was very real, fear. Zvain had made himself a lair in the middle of the grove's largest gra.s.sland, a small hollow some seven mansized strides across. He was noticeably thinner; the druids' a.s.sertion that no one could starve in one of their groves apparently did not apply to a prisoner too frightened to pick a handful of berries from a bush with eyes. And when those fingers slipped his and Zvain wrapped his arms around Pavek as he had done so often in the Urik bolt-hole, Pavek found he couldn't refuse to offer the comfort so obviously needed.

"It's not my fault, Pavek, is it? I was looking for you when he found me. He locked me up, just like this, and then he gave me things-I tried to be careful Pavek, I thought he was a slaver, but he was worse, and then it was too late." Zvain's arms squeezed harder. "You've got to believe me. You've got to get me out of here."

Pavek knelt to return Zvain's embrace, and as the boyish arms wrapped around his neck and the boyish head burrowed into his neck, he found himself wondering why it was easier to hug and hold someone he didn't trust than to comfort Akashia, whom he did. Even now, when tears were soaking his shirt and trickling down his ribs, why should he want to rea.s.sure the boy when he knew, both in his head and his heart, that Telhami was right? It was a tragedy when an innocent youth was corrupted, but that didn't mean that the corruption should be spared its rightful end.

He, himself, had lived in corruption all his life without succ.u.mbing to it-or so both Oelus and Telhami said. Of course, no one had ever tempted him the way Escrissar had tempted Zvain, or abandoned him quite the way he had abandoned the boy. And Zvain was his weak point, the only opening a man like Escrissar needed.

He extracted himself from Zvain's embrace.

"Please, Pavek? Please?" The whine was back; Zvain reattached himself around Pavek's ribs. "Don't leave me here. Take me with you. Make Make them forgive me-like you made them forgive Ruari after he busted the zarneeka stowaway." them forgive me-like you made them forgive Ruari after he busted the zarneeka stowaway."

And how had Zvain learned that?

He pushed the boy away, scowling. Zvain made no attempt to reattach, seemingly resigned to losing this battle, but threw himself instead back onto his lair and scowled up at him.

Was Ruari paying visits to the grove? It was possible. Ruari held himself apart from the farmers and druids who drilled twice every day, trying to transform themselves and their tools into fighters and weapons. Ruari wanted personal personal instruction from both him and Yohan and the a.s.surance that he wouldn't be standing in a line of hoe-toting farmers, but doing hand-to-hand hero's work; an a.s.surance neither he nor Yohan would give. And knowing a bit of the way Ruari's mind worked, it was more than possible that he was sulking in Telhami's grove rather than his own. instruction from both him and Yohan and the a.s.surance that he wouldn't be standing in a line of hoe-toting farmers, but doing hand-to-hand hero's work; an a.s.surance neither he nor Yohan would give. And knowing a bit of the way Ruari's mind worked, it was more than possible that he was sulking in Telhami's grove rather than his own.

Ruari and Zvain together in the same thought sent a shiver down Pavek's back.

The youths were talking, perhaps plotting. Telling himself that he'd have to warn Yohan, if not Telhami, he turned his back on the scowling face.

"You risked your life to save a farmer's brat." The voice from behind him had taken on a new maturity in the past six days, one he could hear, now with his back turned. "You defied that old woman to save a half-elf that tried to kill you; but you won't say a word in my behalf-me, who saved your life, templar, after you took my mother's... And left left me behind." me behind."

He almost turned, then, to defend actions he couldn't explain to himself, but: "Why, Pavek?" The whine was gone, and the maturity, leaving only a soft quiver.

A quiver far more dangerous to all he fought for than all Escrissar's unknown forces. Pavek pried himself free of Zvain's insidious influence and made a clean escape to the barren land outside Telhami's grove.

He was still on the path between the fields when he heard frantic hammering on the hollowed log that served as Quraite's general alarm.

Most of Quraite had a.s.sembled by Telhami's hut by the time he got there. Telhami herself stood beside the door, waiting. Her gray hair stood out from her head in windswept wisps, and her eyes were weepy from the sun.

In the last few days, Pavek had heard her say many times that she watched over Quraite. He remembered how she'd been the first to know that Yohan was crossing the Fist, first to know that Pavek and his companions were returning with her and Zvain; but he'd a.s.sumed that she'd used some trick of the Unseen Way to accomplish that. He'd never guessed, until now, that she literally and actually hovered above her guarded lands.

"They're coming," she said, flatly and firmly. "From the southwest, straight out of Urik."

"All ten thousand?" an anxious farmer asked.

"Fifty men and women, give or take a handful. They've lost some coming across the Fist, but those I saw will finish the journey before sundown."

Fifty sounded better than ten thousand. The farmers sighed with relief, but Pavek didn't. He thought of fifty fighters, probably including Rokka and other renegades from the Urik templarate, and shook his head grimly.

Any templar could take battlefield commands and carry them out. And even a desk-bound procurer like Rokka had to put in his time on the practice fields.

Pavek held himself a competent fighter with the weapons he knew-better than competent, his size, strength and Dovanne's sword would give him a real advantage. But when the fighting was between one man and many, the wise man placed his bets on the many.

He didn't think Escrissar could have recruited fifty renegades in Urik; Hamanu's grip was firm, and his vengeance swift. He thought ten templars was a more reasonable number, with the rest hired rabble from the elven market, only marginally more skilled than the farmers who'd have the morale advantage of fighting for their home and their lives. The odds would still be long, but, if Telhami could contain Escrissar's mind-bending, they'd have a chance.

Yohan had made his own a.n.a.lysis of what they faced: "They'll be parched and exhausted. Maybe they'll make camp." And his eyes sparkled with thoughts of an ambush. Telhami looked at Pavek.

He shook his head. "Unless it's so dark they don't see the trees."

"My thought as well," she agreed.

She took a long moment to study the Quraiters, one by one, looking straight into each pair of eyes with a confident smile. "We've done everything that we could do in advance," she said. "You know what we must do now, and I know that you can do it."

Pavek admitted to himself that for a woman who'd spent her life growing trees, Telhami did a credible job of marshalling her forces for what she, at least, had to know was going to be an all-out, to-the-last-survivor battle. His own confidence rose as he watched the farmers and lesser druids gather the long-handled tools that would serve as their weapons. Calmly determined, they laid the hoes, flails, scythes and rakes beside their stations along the waist-high dirt rampart that encircled Telhami's hut.

In six days they had transformed the village from a cl.u.s.ter of comfortable dwellings and pantries to a bare ground clearing in which they had hastily created three trench-and-rampart rings. They'd hacked stakes from the sacrificed trees and homes and set the largest point-up in the outer bank of the first two ramparts to slow the enemies' advance. Smaller stakes had become make-shift spears heaped in sheaves at each station of the innermost rampart.

The farmers and druids, everyone old enough to fling a stick or bind a length of cloth over a wound, would fight from behind the third ring's rampart, while he and Yohan would add their skills wherever, whenever the circle threatened to break.

And while they were holding back the physical attack, inside the hut Akashia would be shaping and focusing the guardian's power as Telhami combined druidry and the tricks of the Unseen Way to fend off whatever Escrissar sent at them.

And if they failed-if the circle broke and the enemy stormed Telhami's hut, or Escrissar got around Telhami and; the guardian to flood them all with nightmare monsters... Well, every druid had wrought unique spellcraft to hide his or her grove. Escrissar would be hard-put to locate them all, and if he found them, the likelihood was that the zarneeka plants, and everything else the Quraite druids had nurtured for generations, would be dead.

It was as good a defense strategy as they'd collectively been able to devise. Pavek would have given all the gold stashed beneath Telhami's hut for a few bows and the men to shoot them, but there was no sense longing for what they couldn't have. Escrissar and his fifty allies would march undisturbed through the fields and the ring of trees and find an unpleasant surprise waiting for them.

Pavek only hoped the wheel of fate would give him just one opportunity to slip his sword between the interrogator's ribs.

He felt a tug on his shirt and spun around.

"What about me, Pavek?"

Ruari, with his staff.

"You know your place."

"Pavek, I can do better than that-"

"You can't. Gather your weapons, your water, and the cloth for bandages. Take them and yourself to your place on the rampart and stay there!" stay there!"

"I want to fight"

"You're going to fight, sc.u.m. Now-Go!"

He and Ruari stared at each other, then Ruari stalked away. Pavek hoped-prayed to whatever nameless power might listen to a one-time templar, not-quite druid-that Ruari's bile wouldn't get him killed in the first a.s.sault wave. Quraite needed everyone, and Ruari was proficient with that staff of his; he set the standard for the farmers around him. They'd lose heart if Ruari went down in some fool's burst of bravery.

He'd lose heart. lose heart.

Except for Yohan, none of them were veterans, none of them had fought a pitched battle-including himself. Stalking Dovanne's attacker or breaking the heads of petty criminals in his inspector days didn't count. The closest he'd come to combat was skirmishes on the streets of Urik against the Tyrian hooligans years ago.

Inside, he was scared to the marrow and desperate to see another sunrise. He almost envied Ruari his blind anger and commitment.

Waiting was worse than he imagined it could be, knowing that the circle fighters were looking over their shoulders at him and curbing their fears because he looked calm. Yohan, sitting beside him on the stoop of Telhami's hut, looked calm as he examined the edge of his obsidian sword.

But maybe, as Yohan's eyes met his, not calm at all. Maybe Yohan's panic went even deeper, because there was no one at all for him to turn to.

Then, without warning, the mind-bending began: a black fist thrusting through his mind. Everyone jerked backward; a few cried out in shock or terror before Telhami launched her counterattack, and the black fist became a memory.

"He knows we're here, waiting for him." Yohan got to his feet and stretched the dwarf-thick muscles of his arms and legs. "May Rkard guide your sword." He held out his hand. "What do yellow-robe sc.u.m say to each other before the Lion sends them out to die?"

Pavek slapped his hand against Yohan's and pulled himself to his feet. "Better you than me." Which was a lie. He had no idea what templars said to each other.

But Yohan laughed and shook his hand heartily. "That's good. I'll remember that."

"See that you do."

They released each other's hand and took a step backward toward the quadrants of the circle they'd selected for themselves. For a moment Pavek wanted to say something more, something sincere, then Yohan turned away and the moment was gone.

Escrissar brought his force through the trees in a compact group: a dozen fighters in the front rank and three or four in each of the files. If Telhami's estimate of their enemy's strength was correct-and Pavek saw no reason to doubt it-the interrogator was committing himself personally to a single thrust and holding nothing in reserve.

On second glance, the interrogator interrogator wasn't committing wasn't committing himself himself to anything, unless he was the black-haired half-elf marching second-from-the-left. There wasn't a black enamel mask to be seen, like Telhami and Akashia, Escrissar was holding himself out of the battle, mind-bending from a safe distance. to anything, unless he was the black-haired half-elf marching second-from-the-left. There wasn't a black enamel mask to be seen, like Telhami and Akashia, Escrissar was holding himself out of the battle, mind-bending from a safe distance.

And that wasn't the worst thing Pavek saw, or didn't see. He spotted Rokka and a few other templars he recognized from Urik, about ten in all, just as he'd figured. They'd left their yellow robes behind-no surprise; heavy sleeves were a dangerous obstacle to a swinging sword-arm-and marched in such oddments of weaponry and armor as they'd scrounged from the templarate armory and private armorers in the elven market. Their rag-tag panoply stood in considerable contrast with the fighters who marched around them.

Escrissar had filled his force not with the ill-equipped rabble from the market he'd hoped for, but with some three dozen hardened fighters, each of whom carried a polished wooden shield, a javelin, and a yard-long k.n.o.bkerrie club all carved from bronze-hard agafari wood.

The agafari tree grew near Nibenay, and, as far as Pavek knew, no where else in the Tablelands. Nibenay's templarate was composed of the Shadow-King's wives only, so he was either looking at army conscripts-which didn't seem likely given the way they marched-or one of the numerous mercenary companies Nibenay's ruler employed to augment his harem.

But whether the Shadow-King knew that his mercenaries were here, far northeast of Urik, was a question only Elabon Escrissar could answer.

Nibenay's mercenaries threw their single javelin before they descended into the trench around the outer rampart. Two farmers went down. One took a shaft through his left arm; he might recover from the shock to fight again. The other was gut-struck, and his screams were horrible to hear.